As my car sees more track miles now than street miles, and my tiptronic transmission seems to keep wanting to stick (no pun attended) around... I started searching for some sort of solution to add paddles and an aftermarket steering wheel. I'm 6'4" and in slower and tighter turns, a smaller steering wheel would make life much easier. I first found a 996 Turbo modified by vivid that had paddles, but even they didn't know where the owner sourced them... I was pointed in the right direction (japan's ebay listings) by someone at some point, and subsequentially found Works Bell distributed at the time by the Tuners Group in Australia, who at the time had a universal kit, I believed I could make work. Fast forward to now, and the Tuner's Group developed their own kit using the Universal kit that works for not only the 986/996 Porsche... but also many other P-cars.

I say nearly as I had to do some splicing and adding some spade quick release connectors. When I first starting searching, there was not a US distributor for WB, and I thus started communicating with The Tuners Group in Australia... who in the end had the engineering know how to get this don.e Anyways, enough talking... here are the photos... if you have any questions let me know. The red piece is a Works Bell Quick Release with electrical conductors built in so that the horn and paddles work without exterior wires. The right paddle is set for up-shift, the left down shift, and the kit came with a resistor for the airbag wiring.

I've driven rufMD's 360 scuderia and can say the set up is actually similar, except for the whole thing about mine shifting a torque converted ZF tiptronic and now a hydraulic sequential... As far as I know or can find this is the only 986/996 tip I can find running these paddles in the states, and I am sure this will be the only post about them... as I have spent a long time looking for a solution myself, so hopefully this can add to the TS database! So I lied about the pics earliers... here they really are.

pics...

















Here is The Tuner's Group own right up about the car... http://www.tunersgroup.com/Cars/boxster.html

edited a few notes of interest about how the paddles came to be!

 

nice work! looks good!

 

By any chance, were you at EAG's Cars & Coffee in Knoxville? If so I met you, I was Connor's friend from Florida.

 

That is awesome!!!

 

great set up!

 

Yes Sir... nice to meet you too Mark. Glad to see Connor has more than two friends.

 

nicely done.

how come you went with a tip in the first place?

 

Two reconstructive surgies in my left foot/ankle made it impossible to drive with a clutch daily since it was my only car at the time. Five years out from those surgeries, I wouldn't have a tip, but I've learned to love to it.

 

Wow that is a first. Good job!

I have a MK2 986 boxster s.

Is the 3.6 engine swap worth it if say I don't have the connection like you do?

Second, will the brain swap on my car be a lot easlier?

Third, how much faster is the car?

Thanks a lot!

 

If it is going to cost you 20,000+ US$... no
Yes your car has 7.8 Bosch Motronic, it will be plug and play so to say
Considerably faster... just over 300 rwhp with the extra modifications done to intake/exhaust/tuning